The Written Questions Your Monitoring Missed

Any MP or peer can put a written question to a government department, and the department must answer in writing, on the record. Parliament's own system records an expected answer date for every question: for a named day question the Member picks the date, and for ordinary questions the date follows convention. Those expected dates are computed in sitting days, so recess is already allowed for. Both question and answer are published at questions-statements.parliament.uk.

Written questions are the largest single source of government policy statements outside legislation, and one of the best early-warning signals in Westminster. Our full guide, A Guide to Written Parliamentary Questions, covers the mechanics in depth. This piece is about the half of the system that monitoring tends to miss: the questions that do not get answered on time.

Departments answer tens of thousands of questions a session, and the workload is uneven: a department in the news gets a surge of questions precisely when its private office is busiest. Questions get transferred between departments, restarting the clock in practice. Some answers genuinely take research the convention timetable never anticipated. And some questions are awkward, where a late answer is quieter than a difficult one.

Whatever the cause, the effect is the same: the expected date passes, nothing is published, and nothing announces the silence. The official site will show you any question you look up, but it does not ring a bell when an answer fails to arrive. Silence has no publication date.

Emily keeps a continuously synced copy of the Written Questions record and publishes two free boards computed from it daily, with no model in the loop: pure counting over the official record. Here is what the measurement showed on 27 August 2026, over questions tabled in the 90 days to 26 August 2026, against a record of answers complete to 26 August 2026:

• 691 questions past their official expected answer date with no answer on the record, across 26 departments. 56 of them were named day questions, where the Member chose the deadline.
• The Department of Health and Social Care held 159 of them, the most of any department. The same measurement shows it answered 1,436 questions in the period, more than any other department, at a median of 7 days. Volume and backlog travel together.
• The longest-waiting question had been outstanding 71 days past its expected date: tabled 12 June 2026, expected by 16 June 2026, unanswered on a record complete to 26 August 2026.

The answer-time league, over answers dated into the record in the same 90 days, adds the other half of the picture. Top of the league sat the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs: a median of 7 calendar days from tabling to answer across 847 answers. The Department for Education sat at a median of 9 days with a 90th percentile of 35, meaning one in ten of its answers took five weeks or longer. Medians flatter every department; the tail is where your question lives when it is inconvenient.

Each figure above is a deterministic database measurement with a stated date, and the boards link every question shown back to its page on the official record. Browse the live versions at questions awaiting an answer and the answer-time league, or see which stock phrases each department's answers lean on at answer patterns. All three are free to quote with attribution.

Traditional monitoring is built to report what was published: the debate that happened, the answer that arrived, the report that landed. An overdue question is the opposite kind of fact. It is defined by an absence, and detecting it means holding the expected date for every open question and re-checking the record daily against each one. That is bookkeeping, and no analyst skimming feeds at 7am is doing it across 26 departments.

Yet the absence is often the story. An overdue answer on your issue can mean the department cannot agree a line, or that the data requested does not exist, or that an announcement is coming and the answer is being held back for it. When the Member who tabled it starts chasing, that becomes visible too. If you only read what was published, you meet all of this late.

The fix is a weekly discipline, and it is small enough to name in full. A written questions report for a client patch should contain four things:

1. The questions tabled on your issues this week, with the asking Member and the expected answer date.
2. The answers that arrived, with what the minister actually committed to, linked to the record.
3. The questions now past their expected date, with days outstanding counted against a stated record date.
4. What changed since last week: the new silences and the resolved ones.

The fourth item is the loop closing. An overdue question is worth one line the week it slips and a follow-up the week it resolves, and a client who receives that trail sees something rare in monitoring: evidence that the silence was watched, with a date on every claim. Emily assembles exactly this trail from the synced record for the issues you track, which is the work these free boards are the public face of.